Conversation with J. Mark Bertrand

In my early twenties, when I first took an interest in theology, the Internet was still a mysterious button inside America Online, one we didn't dare touch for fear of viruses, whatever those were. Books were something you bought at stores, or if you had discriminating tastes, by mail order. I couldn't have imagined being able to order any book I wanted online at the click of a button, with delivery to my door, any more than I could imagine not needing to read books anymore. You don't now. The quickest way of getting up to speed on any subject is to join the appropriate discussion group online. In a couple of weeks, you've absorbed the prejudices of a disembodied community (whom you consider comrades) and possess as much expertise as you're ever likely to.

Knowledge has been democratized, in other words, but it isn't what it used to be. Like so many mass market goods in a global economy, it looks about right, but isn't made very well, and it doesn't come with much of a warranty.

J: It's interesting that you'd frame knowledge as a form of consumerism. I would argue that some of our theology and spirituality is also a cheaply-made knock off and not hand-crafted by someone with acute attention to detail. We might be treading dangerous ground here, but it seems we often arrive at our opinions not from any concerted effort to understand and assimilate the raw information, but by reading a book about it and deciding whether or not to subscribe to someone else's opinion. The former takes too long.

JMB: Since I have a book to promote, I feel duty-bound to stick up for "reading a book about [something] and deciding whether or not to subscribe to someone else's opinion." I suppose the key is reading more than one book, and doing your own thinking. In Rethinking Worldview, for example, I stress in the introduction that mine is a derivative work, and that the way to get the most from it is to read it side-by-side with Scripture. That's the raw material, so to speak, that I've attempted to craft.

But you make a good point. One of the reasons, I suspect, that a lot of people seem disaffected — or uncommitted — in the realm of politics, or even theology, is not that they don't care (which is often how it's explained) but that they're frustrated by the thought that the most opinionated people in the conversation haven't earned the right to their positions. How many arguments about public policy these days are just re-hashed from the cable shows of the evening before? If you're not going to invest the time and effort to really own your beliefs, then don't be so adamant about them.

I'm not stumping for a lack of resolve, though. I'd like to see people step up and invest what's necessary to be truly engaged in the questions — to do the thinking and the reading, and also the living.

J: We seem to be enamored with this notion of meta-stuff. Meta-fiction. Meta-narrative. Meta-data. Information about information. Is there a generational influence somewhere in there? Is there an iGeneration? Folks who have grown up (or come of age) learning to process information hyper-textually (literally, beyond the text).

JMB: I'm skeptical about generational tags because the lines between cultural criticism and marketing are now blurred. Of all the things to identify with, your customer profile is one of the saddest.

The first person to talk about Generation X was Douglas Coupland, who wrote a book of the same name, a sort of novel with comic strips in the margin. Very hip, very ironic, but also very insightful. If you read that book in the early 90s, it gave you a road map for what was to come. Then the marketing folk discovered the term and decided to make it part of their verbal voodoo, and we started spawning new generations — Y and Z and after that I don't know.

But I always thought Coupland used it more in the sense that Paul Fussell writes about the "X class" in the American class system, the people who opt out and are above it all. Generation X could be avant garde, and it could also be nostalgic for the Eisenhower years. It was another way of pointing out that while postmodern skepticism gives us more choices, they mean less.

Whenever I'm tempted to think that humanity has evolved some exciting new way of knowing that offsets our slump in basic literacy, all I have to do is watch a television game show and how much suspense they can wring out of a multiple choice question about Beethoven or Napoleon. One day our contestants will have to poll the audience to find out who wrote Hamlet, and it won't matter that we can text in shorthand and have a killer collection of manga.

J: It's not just game shows. I hear there's a new [un]reality show that drops a bunch of pre-pubescent boys off in a secluded town and it's supposed to be Lord of the Flies, in HD. Did any of the producers actually read that book? I keep thinking there has to be a plateau that we reach. Or a pendulum swing in the other direction. Now we have TV shows like "The Office," which are completely fiction, but made to look like a reality show. It's story-telling cannibalism. "The Office" is hilarious, though.

JMB: Not if you're talking about the American remake. But let's not go down that path . . . A lot of people are pessimistic about reality TV, but there's one thing I appreciate about it, which is that the producers have a much harder time presenting a false view of human nature. If I write a script for a television drama, I can give you my version of how the world works and what people are really like. Reality shows do this too, through the situations they devise and manipulative editing, but their power is greatly restrained.

Isn't it interesting, for example, that you can put a bunch of people on an island with a cash prize at stake, clearly establishing that the game requires you to deceive and betray, and yet people insist on operating as moral agents? They refuse to play the game, or they invent ways to play it while maintaining a sense of integrity. In literature, the scenario would be straight Lord of the Flies, because the goal is to show the reader what humans in such a situation would become, not to sit back and see.

Now if only we could go back in time and see what a bunch of people from Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation would do on the same island, or the Founding Fathers. That would be worth buying a TiVo.

J: I never in my life thought I would be so interested in all things Vintage. Specifically from the 1920's, '30s, and '40s. Come to find out, there are quite a few folks out there that feel drawn, in some way, to the Golden Era. Hmmm. Bootlegging. The Depression. World War. Not a lot of fun to live through.

JMB: This actually fits nicely with the nostalgia theme Douglas Coupland identified. You might think wearing drape suits and a fedora is an act of rebellion against modernity, just as some folks think embracing a historically-accurate sixteenth century (or worse, nineteenth century) theology is. But it could also be seen as one of the options created by our hypermodern culture — yet another way of being the customer.

I'm constantly obsessing over design objects of the past, so I'm anything but immune. What does it mean, though, that I have this persistent idea in my head that having a restored Citroen DS convertible (with a red interior) will improve not just the quality of my life, but the quality of my being? I've seen a movie, read an essay, admired a line pressed in metal, and the object becomes a tool of self fashioning — at least, it seems like it would be. I haven't tested it yet due to opposition from my wife.

Nostalgia for the past, longing for beautiful objects . . . maybe these get more attention from us than they would have in the past, because we have more money to spend and more devotion, too. The things we might have invested it in — the ethical and religious things, to borrow from Kierkegaard's framework — aren't considered options any longer, so we are over-invested in the aesthetic.

J: "Over-invested," to continue with the capitalist metaphor, implies some sort of market adjustment at some point. A crash, so to speak. Christians already (should) know this: that things of this world aren't really "durable goods." Aesthetics are pre-destined to fail us. Is it over-reaching to say that our theology and our worldview is heavily—and in some cases entirely—influenced by that same kind of search for the Ultimate Aesthetic? Also, circus peanuts.

JMB: A lot of people these days seem to have peanut allergies, so I won't go there. But the idea of theology and worldview as a search for the Ultimate Aesthetic is good. In the Christian arts world, people are always quoting Dostoevsky's line, "Beauty will save the world." I'm not saying beauty is bad and we need to abandon it for religion. Perhaps the point is to see how the yearning for beauty and truth are intertwined.

The crash is already happening, I think. Remember a few years ago, Colleen Carroll's book The New Faithful? She tried to document a trend where young Christians, turning their back on the mega-church religion of their parents, were embracing older expressions of the faith that demanded more from them. I think that's what's behind the resurgence of Reformed theology among younger evangelicals, documented in a Christianity Today article a while back, and also what motivates a lot of emerging church folk — the desire for a faith that puts obligations on us, rather than the other way around.

J: The meaning of the word "genre," as it applies to fiction, seems to be changing. Instead of simply meaning Science Fiction and Fantasy (or SF/F, to prove I'm oh-so-post-modern) it now implies a marketing classification and extends from the work itself to the readers. In fact, "literary" fiction, the kind supposedly taught in the Creative Writing program I'm in, might very well qualify as a bona fide "genre." So might "Christian" fiction. It doesn't seem healthy for the art form as a whole, but I don't see any stopping this excessive compartmentalization.

JMB: Genre just happens to be a word with a variety of meanings. We were all genre writers in grad school, but there were only two genres: fiction and poetry. When creative non-fiction broke out, people called it the "third genre." Obviously, in that sense, the western, the detective novel, and the romance were all sub-categories under fiction. In another sense, though, they were all genres unto themselves, complete with their own rules, and we could speak of literary writing as "non-genre" because of its relative absence of rules.

Where the term really becomes a hindrance is when editors and publication boards take it to heart and start evaluating books based not on their merit but their genre. (People are quick to say this never happens, but it does. Excellent books are turned down in favor of mediocre ones because the lesser one fits the definition of the genre better. Happens all the time.)

Categorization is good, and readers really do identify with their preferred genres in the same way that music fans do. You don't mix country in with heavy metal, and the artist who goes around saying "it's all just music" is going to mystify people, because it's not. Writers have to find a place where their work fits, and not be afraid of the labels, and editors have to be flexible enough to allow that keeping all the rules isn't the only way of writing within a genre.

J: We are told that most readers (well, to be accurate, most purchasers of books) are women. Even though I fully admit I was a hard-core geek, my friends growing up all read books. My three boys are all readers, though some more than others. You and I both are what you might call fanatical readers. Of the people I know at work, there are as many non-reading women as men. Critics are mostly men. Maybe I'm just projecting my own wishes here, but I just have a hard time accepting that most men don't read.

JMB: It seems crazy, I agree, but when it comes to fiction I think it must be true. Whenever I spot someone reading in public — and it doesn't happen as often as it used to, now that we can browse the Internet in public — I like to check the title. Women are much more likely to be reading something interesting. Men are reading biographies about great Americans of the past, or maybe a book about World War II. Young men are reading comics or exposes about how the Bush administration orchestrated September 11. Women are reading novels. Everyone is reading Harry Potter, too, but now that the last book is out, I expect that to change.

Someone asked Jonathan Franzen at a book festival if he was disappointed that American readers devour J. K. Rowling instead of literary novels, and he said something to the effect of, "Hey, I'm just happy they're reading." More often than not, that's my attitude. In a world of Gameboys and Crackberrys, even Dan Brown seems like a grace note.

J: In William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he lays out for us what he was all about. I think the heart of the speech is this paragraph: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands." Do our fictional characters really get defeated but don't lose anything valuable? Don't we have any "universal bones" in our stories on which our characters can grieve? Faulkner uses words that imply constancy. That people are basically the same today as they were in Chaucer's time, when he created characters like the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Humanists, on the other hand, posit that we're different now than we were then. That we've evolved. Christians would seem to be in the best possible position to understand and deal with the idea that a human is a human is a human. Dealing with "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" should come naturally to us. But Christian fiction isn't known for that.

JMB: Isn't Faulkner saying that the threat of the bomb, the grinding tension it creates, has made us something less than fully human? What the Cold War accomplished in his day, our sense of irony perpetuates now. I find this in my own writing, where my efforts to raise the stakes always seem exaggerated, melodramatic, and I have a sense that the small, quiet moments are more meaningful than the big, boisterous ones.

In the case of Christian fiction, I suppose it's self-censorship more than irony that acts as the restraint. Mick Silva quoted a line of Lauren Winner's in which she anticipates the day when Christian writing will depict life rather than sanitizing it. If we had confidence in our worldview, we would not shy away from the world as it really is — certainly, Scripture doesn't — but we don't have it, not really. We tell ourselves an ellipsis is a sign of discretion, but I think it plays differently in the reader's mind, where it implies we don't want to face the whole truth for fear that our house of cards might topple.

J: Flannery O'Connor is often put in the cannon of Christian writers with the likes of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. She didn't make it a secret that she wrote from a very Southern, Catholic background. Her stories are full of scaldingly hot religiosity. But if you get introduced to her work by reading The Violent Bear It Away, you'd probably think she was most definitely not on the side of Christianity. If she really is a "Christian" writer, then what do we make of her? Should we even use her as an example of what "Christian" fiction is all about?

JMB: Funny you should mention that. I love Flannery O'Connor and only regret not having read her sooner, but from time to time I'll hear from an aspiring evangelical writer who, prompted by the universal praise, picks up a book of O'Connor's stories only to recoil in horror. "That's not Christian fiction!" they say, and if they're talking about the evangelical marketplace, they're right. As much as her name is bandied about, I doubt there is a single evangelical house that would publish work like hers coming from a new writer. Emulating O'Connor is a great way to do art. Emulating Dan Brown is a great way to get published.

But here's the disconnect. O'Connor is an artist whose work is deeply influenced by a theological perspective, and she's writing for an audience that doesn't share it. Most evangelical writers are not deeply influenced by their theology — the Christian themes in Christian fiction are usually of the Sunday School variety — and they're writing for an audience that shares their perspective. All it takes for an evangelical writer to "get" O'Connor is to change one of those two facts. The writers who are influenced by Christian theology see what's going on in her work, and the ones writing for a wider audience appreciate the means by which she accomplishes her effects.

Of course, there are people who just don't like the Southern Gothic flavor of the stories, and that's what put me off for the longest time. Read Mystery and Manners before you delve into the fiction, though, and it all starts making sense. The content of O'Connor's fiction shouldn't make us question O'Connor — it should lead us to question ourselves.

J: My wife and I enjoy going to the local mega-mart bookstore when we actually get a night out. In a town of 50,000 (and servicing a rural area of about another 50,000) the place is always busy. I usually have to stand in line at the check-out. The coffee eatery is half-full. All of these people are buying pieces of paper bound together with words on them. But online, I read about publishers slicing imprints, readership dwindling, lamentations about The End Of The Novel. I'm having a hard time figuring out how these two pieces of contrary information fit together. Also, zoo elephants.

JMB: I noticed the same thing when I visited my home town a few weeks ago. There's just the one bookstore — Books-a-Million — and it might as well be the town square. The coffee shop is full of old-timers, golf buddies, and businessmen, and they're rubbing elbows with small town rebels and the ladies of the knitting club. Even so, I think the lamentations are right on. Literacy is down, and despite "long tail" promises, it seems like the gap between the bestsellers and the rest of the books is as large as ever.

Maybe the elephants are to blame. Maybe the donkeys are. I hate to think of anyone being cooped up in a zoo.

J: I feel guilty about all the old books I've read. I haven't been supporting modern authors trying to make a living on their writing. I've bought a half-dozen Philip K. Dick books in the last year but he died in 1982. H.P. Lovecraft: 1937. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: 1930. There's just so much great fiction that's already been written. Stuff that has filtered to the top through thousands of readers and decades of scrutiny. Maybe that's why the blockbuster phenomenon is so critical to a book's success. We really have to care a lot about a book to plop down $35 for the hardback (which we did, of course, for the latest Harry Potter). Why pay for a mediocre product (which might not turn out to be mediocre at all…but I probably won't take the risk of finding out) when I can get an excellent product for half the price? And when there is a really great product, it sells very, very well.

JMB: If new books are suffering because too many people are reading the classics, then so be it. I suspect there are other reasons. If it makes you feel better, though, I've got near complete sets of Raphael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas. One of my favorite genre novelists was a guy named Stanley Weyman. How's that for obscurity?

J: Movie producers these days have relationships with publishers and agents so that manuscripts that haven't even hit the presses yet are snatched up to turn into a movie. Movies made from original screenplays often don't do as well as those where the main characters and story are taken from a novel. It didn't used to be this way. Some of the greatest movies made to date were, first and foremost, a movie. The stories were concocted specifically for telling on the screen. I wonder if, when that title fades onto the screen "Based on the novel [such-and-such]" that we feel more secure in knowing that a lot of thought was put into the story we're about to see. That it's going to be a richer experience because there's some artistic foundation behind the movie. I know a lot of people have lost faith in the story-telling ability of people in Hollywood, but is that really where we're at? That we've taken their toys away from them because they couldn't play nice and we'll give them back—temporarily—if they promise to be good?

JMB: This reminds me of last year's adaptation of The Children of Men, where it came out in an interview that the director, Alfonso Cuaron made a point of not reading the book. Christian fans were disappointed that the religious content didn't come through, though a lot more of it is present than you'd expect. Somehow his not reading the book seemed very symbolic to me. I haven't read it either, though, so I shouldn't judge.

J: I enjoy watching silent movies on Turner Classic Movies. I devour them. My kids have also caught the bug and know Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd by sight. They think (and they came to this conclusion on their own, without my prompting) that these old movies are just better than modern ones. Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The General is just great family entertainment. I think part of it is the raw, gritty humanity of those old movies. Buster Keaton in particular could capture that character that tries to do something grand and just isn't very good at it. In fact, hilariously bad at it. People really identify with characters like that.

JMB: I don't know if I'd go as far as saying that silent films were better — there's something to be said for the time when film finally broke away from the stage and became a truly new medium. But it's a shame that, like sub-titled films, the silent ones are largely lost to us, and only because the reading seems insurmountable. You know that some modern composers have re-scored silent films? I think that's pretty cool. If I were musical, I'd like to try it.

J: I've heard some of the literati say that you just can't teach writing. That really understanding what makes fiction work is a realization you have to come to on your own. I can't subscribe to that because the Creative Writing program I'm in has directly contributed toward my development as a writer. I can see the improvement from the workshops, the literature classes, and the focused study of the craft. I'm really glad I decided to go back to school, even though it's really difficult to do that when you've got a job and a family. Do you feel like your academic career was worth it? Would you be where you're at today if you'd gotten a comparable degree in a more academic vein (one not directly related to writing)?

JMB: You can teach craft for sure. What you can't really teach is the artistic sensibility, the taste and feel aspect of the work. But you can help nurture it, and that's what creative writing programs seem to do. My time in academia was interrupted when I got married before finishing my thesis, then dropped out for three years. All that time, I told myself I didn't need the schooling, that it was better to live outside the classroom, but at the last moment (as my old credits began to disappear) I had a change of heart and begged for readmission. Best decision of my life. I learned more in the last two semesters than in my whole life up to then. And I haven't stopped learning. Unfortunately, I haven't stopped forgetting, either, so I don't have much to brag about.

Where would I be if I'd done a different degree? I would probably still be writing, and I might even be more productive, if not as accomplished. Grad school had the Hamlet effect on me. I went in as a fun-loving, bombastic aspiring thriller writer and came out as a conflicted artist, wanting to write for the ages on the one hand and feeling I should get paid for it on the other. If I hadn't studied literature and writing, I would have gone into either history or theology. Either one would make an excellent preparation for being a novelist, if you ask me.